Have your sexual fantasies gone a bit limp? Tired of watching the same old mainstream porn? Check out Fuck.com's perfect introduction to hentai and learn all there is to know about anime, tentacle porn and all sorts of kinky taboos.

Hentai definition

The first striking thing about hentai is that the term doesn’t mean what you think it means. To English-speaking audiences, hentai designates sexy anime with a hint of taboo-busting. In Japanese culture, the term has far stronger connotations of sexual weirdness, quite often to the point of stuff that’s pretty, well, dysfunctional and unlovely.

If you fancy getting a little weird, though, hentai (using the term in the US/UK sense) can give you some interesting ideas. In general, hentai is likely to show the sort of unusual sexual activity that doesn’t come under the BDSM heading, though there may be a certain amount of dominance and submission involved.

Regarding turn-ons, there’s more likely to be a degree of crossover with that subset of erotic fiction usually labelled as ‘paranormal’ – not just sexy vampires, but ghosts, devils and shapeshifters of various kinds. If you’re not familiar with that, there’s a whole other world for you to discover: there is, I promise you, at least one erotic novella featuring a were-cuttlefish as the romantic lead.

Tentacle porn

Sea creatures, more mythological ones than the sort you find in the local aquarium and particularly those of the tentacled variety, seem to evoke a certain amount of erotic interest: googling ‘tentacle porn’ will bring up plenty of hits. Tentacle bondage and tentacle penetration are things that people sometimes associate with hentai under the general heading of ‘bizarre stuff’, but not all hentai involve tentacles, and not all tentacle-related erotic fantasy is strictly hentai.

Steampunk fiction and media, for instance, has a kind of subset of the interest devoted to the Cthulhu Mythos. Cthulhu was a fictional monster created by the horror writer HP Lovecraft (who, by all accounts, was not very interested in sex and didn’t write erotica). The creature has entered mainstream culture even though the original stories are not that widely read. Cthulhu was vaguely described in the original stories, but most modern fans seem to have agreed on a concept that is, an octopus with enormous bat-wings.

There does appear to be a certain amount of Cthulhu-related porn that is also labelled as hentai and will almost certainly feature tentacle penetration, or tentacle bondage. You can buy Cthulhu-shaped dildos, and any number of tentacle-themed sex toys, many of which look enough like an abstract sculpture that you could leave them on the mantlepiece and not be afraid of visitors getting more information about your sexual tastes than you would want them to.

Another type of sex toy that fits all the meanings of ‘hentai’, is what’s called an ovipositor. These are devices that will ‘lay alien eggs’ inside your body – the eggs are made of unflavoured gelatin, so safe to use. Online reviews of these toys remind potential customers that you have to make the gelatin eggs yourself, though the company provides a mould and instructions, so it’s perhaps not a kink to engage in spontaneously.

Hentai imagery is more straightforward dirty anime: cartoon figures.

Dirty anime

A lot of the most easily accessible hentai imagery is more straightforward dirty anime: cartoon figures, often with exaggerated breasts or buttocks, engaged in a variety of sexual activities. Some characters featured are superhero-types or other fantasy figures, but many are more representative of ‘ordinary’ people, though always rendered in the manga or anime style.

Even the more normal figures are likely to be represented doing far-out sexual things, contorting themselves into impossible positions or sporting disproportionately large genitalia. It’s not uncommon for them to be parodies of mainstream cartoon characters. Some hentai has a fair bit in common with fanfic or slashfic. People will create hentai-style imagery of fictional characters not previously known for their sexual appetites and put them into explicit scenes, just as fanfic writers tell stories of heroes and villains engaging in much closer relationships than they were allowed in the original book.

Hentai is part of a broader subculture of sexy geekery or geek sex, and its existence and popularity demonstrate that there aren’t very many limits on the erotic imagination. Another area to dive into is that of cosplay (though bear in mind that not all cosplayers are comfortable with erotic connotations, and some cosplay events are family-orientated and not welcoming to anything kinky).

If you're looking to find a new favourite fetish, delving into the world of hentai can open your eyes to a whole lot of potential pleasure, or at least the discovery that you're not alone in having an unusual fantasy. It is a massive genre, though, so be prepared to spend a lot of time investigating online as to what’s out there. You might see a few things you’d rather not have ever thought about, but you might also discover plenty of different varieties of naughty fun.